Governing through Eco-Anxiety (original) (raw)

Design and Temporality. Integration.

Cultural Anthropology

In last week's Deviation (http://culanth.org/fieldsights/893-design-and-temporality-deviation) , Brent Luvaas turned the question of anthropology and design on its head. He suggested that design as a profession may have more to offer anthropology in terms of reinventing itself than anthropology has to offer design. In this Integration, I engage with Luvaas's provocative suggestion, but depart from it by further investigating William Bissell (http://culanth.org/fieldsights/886-design-and-temporality-provocation) and Amelia Hassoun (http://culanth.org/fieldsights /891-design-and-temporality-translation) 's arguments that design is more than the design profession. In investigating the ramifications of this point, I explore what I believe has been lost in this conversation, namely the theorization of power and design. As Hassoun highlighted, design is produced through interaction, both in its initiation and reception. All design is therefore intrinsically unstable, open to multiple remakings. Herein lies the question of power. Although design is indeed world-making, neither the past nor the future simply lie in waiting; instead, they are created through the interaction of people and things mobilizing unequal possibilities for realising their visions (Trouillot 1995). Notions of past, future, and the very imaginings of temporality are historically constituted and politically shaped . Given this, I argue that anthropology provides one means of understanding the power relations through which designs produce temporalities.

Global Pandemic, Translocal Medicine: The COVID-19 Diaries of a Tibetan Physician in New York City

2021

This article analyzes the audio diaries of a Tibetan physician, originally from Amdo (Qinghai Province, China), now living in New York City. Dr. Kunchog Tseten describes his experiences during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, in spring and summer 2020, when Queens, New York—the location where he lives and works—was the "epicenter of the epicenter" of the novel coronavirus outbreak in the United States. The collaborative research project of which this diary is a part combines innovative methodological approaches to qualitative, ethnographic study during this era of social distancing with an attunement to the relationship between language, culture, and health care. Dr. Kunchog's diary and our analysis of its contents illustrate the ways that Tibetan medicine and Tibetan cultural practices, including those emergent from Buddhism, have helped members of the Himalayan and Tibetan communities in New York City navigate this unprecedented moment with care and compassion.

"What have you heard?" Secrecy, State, and Space in Kashmir

Fieldsights , 2021

This piece looks at the role of secrecy in the Indian state's control of Kashmir and the role of the pend (public sphere peculiar to Kashmir) where the state's power wielded through the regime of secrecy is contested via the sharing of information/news.

Enclosure

Fieldsights, Theorizing the Contemporary, Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2019

From the collection Topology as Method

Introduction: Negotiating the Crisis | Critical Perspectives on Climate Governance

Cultural Anthropology: Hot Spots, Fieldsites, 2022

This Hot Spots series critically examines the global apparatus of climate change governance, through ethnographic analysis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)’s Conference of Parties (COP)—and beyond. These essays throw new light on climate negotiations from diverse spaces, by examining: institutional structures and practices of international civil servants, delegates, experts and negotiators; the technopolitical work of climate governance models, thematic trends, spatial rhetoric and emissions accounting measures for self-interested nation-states; popular demands to address loss and damage through decolonization, plurinational democracy, and Indigenous knowledge and science; as well as significant absences that expose unresolved tensions between and among environmental justice movements, national governments, and corporate interests. This series features ethnographic narratives bridging these spaces and imaginaries, from the official UNFCCC negotiation zone and the knowledge it produces to parallel climate summits led by Indigenous peoples, environmental activists, and civil society groups. Our ethnographic observations suggest that, far from a unified global voice, the different parties involved in climate negotiations present vital yet incompatible political responses to the crisis, based on uneven forms of inclusion and exclusion in scenarios of just, equitable and sustainable development.